It’s time to end the howling in the public square over Amanda Todd’s death.

For her family and friends, the sadness will never end, only lessen.

But for the rest of us, our time, energy and money is best directed at doing something that might save the next child.

We don’t need a parliamentary committee on bullying — cyber or otherwise.

We don’t need legislation that does little more than exhort us to be nicer to one another. We do need to be nicer, but nobody can legislate that.

And we don’t need more awareness raising, given the incredible number of people who have spoken or written over the past week about having been the targets of bullying, intimidation and harassment themselves.

What we need are more people on the frontlines so that when a troubled teen calls a crisis line there’s someone there to answer it. It shouldn’t ring two dozen or more times — as one did when I called earlier this week to make sure that the number was correct.

We need people to deal with what Mary Ellen Turpel-Lafond, B.C.’s child and youth representative, described Wednesday as desperate kids and parents in the “huge lineup at the door” for social services.

Some kids are waiting a year or more before being assessed or treated, she said.

The long wait times exacerbate children’s suffering, often leading to more significant problems.

In calling for a comprehensive review of mental health services, Turpel-Lafond said that when a 12-year-old phones a crisis line, “You don’t say, ‘Tell your parents to pay $120 an hour and we’ll have someone talk to you.’ They’re supposed to get support.”

That’s especially so in British Columbia, which has one of the highest child poverty rates in Canada, with nearly one in six children living in families whose before-tax income falls below Statistics Canada’s low-income cut-off.

Currently, the government spends $94 million to provide nearly 20,000 B.C. kids with mental health services, which include substance abuse treatment. That’s twice as many as in 2003, even though the proportion of Canadians aged 12 to 29 has decreased.

But the outcomes are little changed.

Suicide continues to account for a quarter of all youth who die between the ages of 15 and 24. More troubling is that the rate among first nations children aged 10 to 19 is four times the overall rate in Canada, and the percentage of lesbian, gay and bisexual youths in B.C. who have attempted suicide is seven times higher than the average rate.

Kids are under tremendous pressure, according to the 2011 report of Canada’s public health officer.

Dr. David Butler-Jones quotes StatsCan data that 14 per cent of youths and 24 per cent of young adults described most days as being “quite a bit or extremely stressful.”

They also lack confidence. In 2006, while half the boys in Grade 6 said they had confidence in themselves, less than a quarter of Grade 9 and 10 boys were confident. Girls’ confidence was much lower. In Grade 6, 36 per cent were confident; by Grade 10, only 14 per cent were.

More recently, local statistics were published last week in the Journal of Happiness Studies. One in seven girls and one in six boys felt victimized several times a week, according to lead researcher Dr. Martin Guhn and his UBC colleagues. They surveyed 3,026 kids aged 10 from 72 Vancouver schools.

They found no differences between boys’ and girls’ reported levels of bullying and depression. However, they noted that bullying is particularly detrimental to the psychological health of girls.

But there’s a positive (as one might expect in a journal of happiness) that points to a way forward.

Since adult and peer support is an essential buffer to dealing with bullying, the researchers urge “interventions that foster relationship-building skills and simultaneously reduce victimization. ... Children need more than the absence of risk factors to experience good mental health and well-being.”

The question, they said, is how best to do that.

Experts are already pointing the way forward. We need to make sure services are available when children and youth need them, and there needs to be money for research to ensure that funds are wisely spent on services and programs.

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Daphne Bramham: It’s time to refocus on saving the next Amanda Todd

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